It’s easy to forget the iPad’s been around for only three years, since it’s made such a big footprint in our day-to-day lives. It’s great for lean-back, leisurely weekend activities like watching a movie, video chatting with faraway relatives, and playing a few rounds of Words with Friends. But don’t leave it behind when it’s time to return to the salt mines Monday morning—turns out, the iPad works at the office almost as hard as you do.

The days leading up to Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference are always a frenzied affair, a bundled mass of nerves and anticipation filled with rumors, spy shots and black-draped banners. It's only natural to expect big things from this year's keynote, but like any Apple event, people are sure to be disappointed. So before the big day arrives, I thought I'd help temper expectations a bit by breaking down the odds — with an emphasis on design, of course.

Shovel Knight — a side-scrolling, retro-styled action game that successfully earned more than $300,000 on Kickstarter back in April — is on its way to Mac. The development team at Yacht Club Games is currently hard at work on the title, preparing it for a tentative holiday 2013 release, but company “captain” Sean Velasco took some time out of his hectic schedule to tell us why we’re gonna dig this whimsical, retro-inspired adventure.

The App Store is a wonderland of diverse gaming goodness, including deeply absorbing role-playing and strategy games, gripping narrative experiences, and titles that let you build up a character and skills over a large stretch of time. But for many of us, the games we turn to the most are the ones that offer immediate, short-term thrills – the games we can play for a few minutes at a time with minimal hassle, but which are entertaining and engrossing enough to play for much longer when desired. For those needs, we present the 25 best quick-hit games for iPhone and iPod touch, all of which let you play a game, level, race, or round in a few minutes or less. When you need to fill a short stretch of your day, these are the games you'll want.

Strategy-game developer Firaxis has made a couple of small but impressive forays into iOS territory this year with turn-based titles Haunted Hollow and Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol, but it’s poised to go a lot bigger this summer. Specifically, it’s bringing its 2012 strategy blockbuster, XCOM: Enemy Unknown (which debuted on Mac in April), to iPad, iPhone and iPod touch — and we’ve had a chance to take it for a spin.

After six years of cases, keyboards and camera lenses, I figured I had seen every iPhone accessory there is. Over the years, I've tried more stands, cable organizers and styluses than I care to remember, but I've pretty much abandoned them all. It's not that they didn't perform as advertised, they just never seemed to be around when I actually needed them. I tend to travel light — my favorite "case" for the iPhone is AppleCare+ — so I've never really cared enough about any iPhone accessory to let it take up precious pocket space, no matter how well designed. But XiStera might be the first.

QuickTime Player is great for doing short screen-capture videos when you need only limited editing capabilities, but to do more professional screen captures with screen zooming and other niceties, you’ll want to turn to a screen-capture application like Screen Flow or Camtasia for Mac. These tools, while somewhat costly, provide excellent abilities for both recording and professionally editing your recordings in an iMovie-style interface. Alternatively, if you have the time and the editing prowess, you can use iMovie to import your QuickTime recordings and edit them to your liking.

It's been six years since we first laid eyes on Apple's iconic vision for the smartphone home screen, and after dozens of iterations and imitations, it looks like it's all about to change. With the public unveiling of iOS 7 just around the corner, we thought we'd make a list of all the things that we hope to see unveiled at WWDC.

As I was following the stream of Google I/O updates on my Twitter timeline last week, one thought kept popping into my head: Apple could never get away with this.

I'm not saying it wasn't interesting. Over the course of three hours, Google showcased its new Hangouts app and Google Play Music All Access service, some exciting developer tools and major updates to Maps, Chrome and Now, but anyone expecting a repeat of last year's show was sorely disappointed.